AltspaceVR announced on July 28th that it will be shuttering its popular social platform for virtual reality, which has more than 35,000 monthly active users, on August 3rd. AltspaceVR was particularly popular because it allowed anyone using its service to meet people from around the world, attend free live events, and even play interactive games with friends. The ambitious VR app raised more than $15 million in venture funding since its founding in 2013 from prominent venture capital firms, such as Formation 8 and Maven Ventures. AltspaceVR also attracted investments from an impressive lineup of corporate investment funds, including...

Amazon has long been rumored to be developing a broad portfolio of virtual reality products and related services, including VR movies, a platform and interface for content, and even an expansive virtual shopping mall. This week, the Seattle-based conglomerate announced G3 Instances, the latest generation of Amazon EC2 Accelerated Compute Instances. The announcement is important as application developers can save time and money when configuring infrastructure by now launching G3 instances, a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud, to support graphics-intensive applications. G3 instances will make it easy to procure a powerful combination of GPU,...

Immersive computing technologies, such as VR and AR, will push the connectivity requirements by needing more network capacity, lower latency to the network's edge, and consistent quality of service. Stakeholders in the telecommunications industry face the daunting challenge of providing cost-effective mobile broadband services in today's less than ideal operating conditions. This is why Nokia, Alphabet's Access Group and Qualcomm Technologies collaboration in February 2017 to create a full 360° "in car" experience in real-time during a stock car race was such an impressive feat. The demonstration called the Richard Petty Driving Experience showed the capabilities of LTE-based Citizens...